This invention relates generally to media systems and, more particularly, to media systems with sports-specific viewing and tuning enhancements.
An interactive media guidance application, such as an interactive television program guide, allows a user to tune to and display a wide array of media content that is available within a media system. It also facilitates the display of additional information (e.g., program schedule and summary information) about the media content. This additional information may be accessed from a variety of data sources and data feeds and may include, for example, content summaries, genre classifications, and ratings information. The interactive media guidance application may also support advanced features, such as content searching and filtering, channel scanning, and access to other interactive applications, such as a home shopping application.
Such media guidance applications are typically generalized applications that support basic media guidance functionality for a wide array of media content of a variety of different genres and subgenres. These applications, however, typically fail to provide a custom set of features and functionality for specific types of media content, such as sporting events and other sports-related content.
In addition, some media guidance applications fail to take full advantage of today's high-end user equipment devices. For example, current user equipment devices may support multiple digital or analog tuners, allowing for more than one channel or media content to be tuned, displayed, and/or recorded simultaneously. Current media guidance applications fail to efficiently manage and leverage the capabilities of multiple tuners to better match how certain types of viewers (e.g., sports viewers) commonly watch and interact with sporting events displayed on the user equipment device. As a result, idle tuners are often untuned or tuned to content that is not of particular interest to the viewer. In addition, traditional tuner management schemes for multi-tuner systems are not optimized for certain types of viewing, such as sports viewing.
For example, in order to tune and display a digital television channel, many steps typically are performed. The digital content may first be demodulated from a digital carrier frequency and then FEC decoded from the demodulated transport stream (TS). The digital content may then be demultiplexed from the demodulated transport stream. After the digital content is demultiplexed from the transport stream, the content may be extracted from a particular packet identifier (PID) stream. In addition, decryption and decoding (e.g., MPEG-2 or H.264 decoding) may be required. These digital tuning and decoding processes may take an appreciable amount of time, during which a blank or black screen is typically displayed to the viewer. This idle time is particularly noticeable to users who switch back and forth between a small number of content selections, like the way sports viewers switch back and forth between a small number of televised sporting events.
In addition, a viewer is unable to efficiently switch between sporting events of interest to the viewer at any given time. For example, although some user equipment devices support last channel recall or similar functionality, last channel recall functions are typically limited to switching back only to the most recently accessed television channel. The ability to efficiently switch between multiple high-interest content selections is severely limited. Real-time buffering and immediate video control (e.g., pause and rewind functions) after switching to a sporting event of interest are also severely limited because of idle tuners or tuners tuned to arbitrary content.